InTrust 11.4.2 - Deployment Guide

Deploying Agents

• Automatic Deployment
• Manual Deployment
• Monitoring the Agent Status
• Changing the Agent Account
• Setting Up Agent Security

Automatic Deployment

In most cases, you can automatically deploy agents on a site. Open the Configuration node, right-click the desired site, and select Install agents. Agents are deployed to each of the site's computers.

Note the following:

1. It is assumed that the account under which the InTrust Server service is running has the administrative rights over the computers where you plan to install agents. If the account does not have enough rights, specify a different account (with sufficient privileges) using the Properties page of the InTrust site.
2. If you perform any operation that requires an agent to be installed on the target computer, the agent is automatically installed on that computer (for example, when you activate a real-time monitoring policy to monitor site computers).

Manual Deployment

Agents should be deployed manually on the Unix-based computers, and on the Windows-based computers under the following (or similar) circumstances:

• The InTrust server and the processed computers are connected by unreliable and slow links. Agent installation fails when the packet drop rate exceeds 5%.
• The processed computers are behind a firewall.

To install an agent manually, follow the instructions provided in the Installing Agents Manually topic or in the InTrust_11.4.2_InstallingAgentsManually.pdf document shipped with the agent installation package.

Monitoring the Agent Status

When an agent communicates with the InTrust server using TCP, it periodically sends a special communication packet—agent heartbeat—to inform server that this agent is running. By default, heartbeat frequency is set to 120 seconds (this value can be modified by the corresponding organization parameter in the configuration database). Heartbeats help server to monitor for agent status:

• If no heartbeat was received from an agent during 240 seconds (default value) since the last one, the server considers this agent to be not responding, and changes corresponding agent status (record in the configuration database).
• If no heartbeat was received from an agent during 600 seconds since the last one, the server considers this agent to be lost, and tries to restore (re-install) it. By default server tries to recover an agent every 300 sec.

To view current agent’s status, in InTrust Manager, select Configuration | InTrust Servers, expand your InTrust server’s node, and click Agents.